buffalobillygoat
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2013
- Messages
- 141
I've been lurking around the various Recovery support forums for the last few months and I just wanted to introduce myself and thank everybody who posts here for getting me through my most recent effort at getting clean. Whilst I wasn't ready to share my own story just reading others' stories and advice has been a godsend. I used to post in Bluelight when I was still enamoured with drugs - you know, actually getting high and having amazing psychedelic experiences with friends, if only I had left it at that! I've been an opiate addict since the age of 17 which is going on 10 years now. Mostly I took codeine and only occasionally something stronger when it became available. I avoided heroin, and only IV'd twice, but I have done pretty much every prescription opiate out there. Whilst compared to many other addicts, my habit has (usually) been small in terms of tolerance, I was using something at least once a day, but more likely 3 or 4 times for years. Also, my addiction has always been a (badly kept) secret. In 2011 my girlfriend discovered I'd been getting high every day for months, so I went to a treatment program run here in perth called fresh start which uses naltrexone implants and that worked amazingly (I'm not here to evangelise for or to bash this treatment). I didn't think about opiates for well over a year, and it was great - did heaps of shit, got fitter than I'd ever been doing crossfit 5 days a week while working 60 hours and went travelling and home (i'm from northern ireland). What I didn't spend a single minute of that sobriety doing was addressing my addiction.
>snip< towards the end of 2012 as the naltrexone wore off I >came across an amazing free supply of all the hard pharmaceuticals< I managed over these months not to get addicted but was using under my girlfriends nose again. The only time I've used opiates with her was in india when we got some liquid opium. That was a great experience. I left that job partly as an act of self preservation to get away from the drugs, fell back onto codeine until I discovered >an internet source<
I thought I was being really smart, ordering fentanyl through the mail. It ticked all the boxes, I didn't have to deal with street dealers (i've always hated that), it was such a tiny amount of substance that even if it was discovered, customs were unlikely to pursue, a little goes a long long way and >snip< I had 'planned' that a half gram of fent citrate should last me around four months, it barely lasted four weeks. I reasoned that I had never really gotten physically addicted in the past 9 years, I wouldn't on this. When the stuff arrived, i took less than a match heads worth of powder and put it in a nasal spray, 5 minutes later I was >high< A week later I was full on addicted, dosing probably 20 times a day, at least. I was nodding off at work - driving machines, nodding while driving on the road sometimes, don't know how I didn't crash. Even still, I was working 50-60 hours a week and still hitting the gym cooking fresh stuff three times a day, keeping all appointments etc and generally feeling like superman. I only realised I was going to run out in the fourth week of this madness so I quickly ordered more but it was too late, I started to withdraw at work one wednesday morning, I went home, blaming the flu which had been going round and nearly crashed the car three or four times because I was shaking so badly. I called fresh start later that afternoon in tears and booked an appointment for the friday and that wait from wednesday to the friday was hell. I had no medication (save for a bottle or two of bourbon), no family, no girlfriend and no friends to help me through this one. On several occasions I laughed for hours whilst rocking back and forth and crying at what a fool I'd been, how fucking stupid I'd been to believe my own bullshit. I read this forum religiously during these days just to remind myself that it would end.
And it did. Friday finally comes and the worst of the withdrawals are over and I visit the doc to approve me for another implant - which I need because I've got another delivery coming and If I don't get the implant I certainly won't have the strength not to use it and be in an even worse situation in another couple of weeks and another several days of absence from work to explain. The doctor also scripts me some valium and serepax thank christ, so that night I sleep like a baby. I get the implant the next day along with a few more benzos.
So that was mid june, I still feel like shit most days, and I haven't strictly speaking been sober - I'm drinking probably six or seven units of alcohol a night and i'm eating absolute shit it's like I've tried to find substitute addictive patterns to replace the opiates. I'm going to counselling this time round and my guy says I spend 24 hours a day thinking, don't know who the fuck I am, that I'm totally disconnected from my body and the reason I use drugs is to stop thinking. This makes sense to me. I find myself worrying about everything, the past, the future, what in the fuck I'm doing with my life where I bring on incredible anxiety, sometimes not unlike a panic attack The uncomfortable truth it brings with it is that in the past, when I've been sober, I've used people (girlfriend particularly) to fill this space. My counsellor has advised me to meditate which I'm doing with some success, but i need to quit the drinking, I know that. He also advised that at least once a day, to do something with complete mindfulness, like, say eating a meal - to do that and only that and with full attention. I guess this is to rediscover the joy of just living. Something I'm struggling with at the moment. Does anyone else have experience with this kind of practice? Intuitively, it feels right for me - I know I'm not comfortable in my own skin (not in a body-dysmorphic way) - I always need to be distracted by something.
Thank you if you read this far, I'm almost finished - i needed to write this. So my situation at the moment is pretty shitty - I'm on the other side of the world to all of my friends and family, and my girlfriend is pursuing her career in a town thats a 20 hour drive from where I am while I work my arse off in a job I hate and which doesn't go anywhere. But I think maybe this is the perfect (if shit) situation to be in to deal with these issues - I still have a job and a place to live and a car, I haven't burnt all my bridges and the fact that I don't have people in my life at the moment means I have to do this. And now that I've found bluelight again, I can bore you all silly with it all. No seriously, thank you all for getting me through the worst of the W/Ds and the PAWS which is now undoubtedly a part of my life. I hope at some point I can do the same for somebody else.
>buffalo<
>snip< towards the end of 2012 as the naltrexone wore off I >came across an amazing free supply of all the hard pharmaceuticals< I managed over these months not to get addicted but was using under my girlfriends nose again. The only time I've used opiates with her was in india when we got some liquid opium. That was a great experience. I left that job partly as an act of self preservation to get away from the drugs, fell back onto codeine until I discovered >an internet source<
I thought I was being really smart, ordering fentanyl through the mail. It ticked all the boxes, I didn't have to deal with street dealers (i've always hated that), it was such a tiny amount of substance that even if it was discovered, customs were unlikely to pursue, a little goes a long long way and >snip< I had 'planned' that a half gram of fent citrate should last me around four months, it barely lasted four weeks. I reasoned that I had never really gotten physically addicted in the past 9 years, I wouldn't on this. When the stuff arrived, i took less than a match heads worth of powder and put it in a nasal spray, 5 minutes later I was >high< A week later I was full on addicted, dosing probably 20 times a day, at least. I was nodding off at work - driving machines, nodding while driving on the road sometimes, don't know how I didn't crash. Even still, I was working 50-60 hours a week and still hitting the gym cooking fresh stuff three times a day, keeping all appointments etc and generally feeling like superman. I only realised I was going to run out in the fourth week of this madness so I quickly ordered more but it was too late, I started to withdraw at work one wednesday morning, I went home, blaming the flu which had been going round and nearly crashed the car three or four times because I was shaking so badly. I called fresh start later that afternoon in tears and booked an appointment for the friday and that wait from wednesday to the friday was hell. I had no medication (save for a bottle or two of bourbon), no family, no girlfriend and no friends to help me through this one. On several occasions I laughed for hours whilst rocking back and forth and crying at what a fool I'd been, how fucking stupid I'd been to believe my own bullshit. I read this forum religiously during these days just to remind myself that it would end.
And it did. Friday finally comes and the worst of the withdrawals are over and I visit the doc to approve me for another implant - which I need because I've got another delivery coming and If I don't get the implant I certainly won't have the strength not to use it and be in an even worse situation in another couple of weeks and another several days of absence from work to explain. The doctor also scripts me some valium and serepax thank christ, so that night I sleep like a baby. I get the implant the next day along with a few more benzos.
So that was mid june, I still feel like shit most days, and I haven't strictly speaking been sober - I'm drinking probably six or seven units of alcohol a night and i'm eating absolute shit it's like I've tried to find substitute addictive patterns to replace the opiates. I'm going to counselling this time round and my guy says I spend 24 hours a day thinking, don't know who the fuck I am, that I'm totally disconnected from my body and the reason I use drugs is to stop thinking. This makes sense to me. I find myself worrying about everything, the past, the future, what in the fuck I'm doing with my life where I bring on incredible anxiety, sometimes not unlike a panic attack The uncomfortable truth it brings with it is that in the past, when I've been sober, I've used people (girlfriend particularly) to fill this space. My counsellor has advised me to meditate which I'm doing with some success, but i need to quit the drinking, I know that. He also advised that at least once a day, to do something with complete mindfulness, like, say eating a meal - to do that and only that and with full attention. I guess this is to rediscover the joy of just living. Something I'm struggling with at the moment. Does anyone else have experience with this kind of practice? Intuitively, it feels right for me - I know I'm not comfortable in my own skin (not in a body-dysmorphic way) - I always need to be distracted by something.
Thank you if you read this far, I'm almost finished - i needed to write this. So my situation at the moment is pretty shitty - I'm on the other side of the world to all of my friends and family, and my girlfriend is pursuing her career in a town thats a 20 hour drive from where I am while I work my arse off in a job I hate and which doesn't go anywhere. But I think maybe this is the perfect (if shit) situation to be in to deal with these issues - I still have a job and a place to live and a car, I haven't burnt all my bridges and the fact that I don't have people in my life at the moment means I have to do this. And now that I've found bluelight again, I can bore you all silly with it all. No seriously, thank you all for getting me through the worst of the W/Ds and the PAWS which is now undoubtedly a part of my life. I hope at some point I can do the same for somebody else.
>buffalo<
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. The technique you are referring to is called mindfulness is it not.. and yes it is thought of so highly around here that it has its own little box with all the other important stuff on the top of TDS.. 
.." so this is all really common. adiiction causes many things and big differences in emotions are a huge one, please look through >
